Nintendo DS Debug Cartridge

Nintendo DS Debug Cartridge

Sometime ago a Nintendo DS debug cartridge was sold on eBay and a couple of weeks ago the rom of that cart was shared and preserved online (NINTENDO DS NTR DEBUG) thanks to NintendyFan from the GBAtemp Form. There is some interesting stuff that we can see in this DS debug cart, such as weird icons, models of Nintendo characters and music from Mario Kart 64 (?!?). We are not sure why they chose such kind of strange images and sounds to test the Nintendo DS hardware, but it could be possible that hidden in the rom’s code there could be even more unusual / beta files, just like in that old SNES debug / hardware test cart. Does anyone want to try to find them?

In order to get to the menu, you have to hold Start + Select when launching the ROM.

Here’s the description from the eBay auction:

Up for grabs is a Debug Mode / Dev cartridge for the Original Nintendo DS and DS Lite Models of handhelds. I have never seen anything quite like this before on the market. We received a few of these, totally smashed and broken up, however we were able to recover this cart and get it to load up. It was tested on each model of DSi including the 3DS, but would error out. This is because the cart is specific to testing on the original DS software on the older handhelds. This is an official Nintendo cart that was apparently supposed to be decommissioned before being tossed out, but whoever attempted to break this one didn’t do a thorough enough job.

As you can see from the photos and video, the date on the program is August 18th, 2004; which is 3 months before the handheld was released anywhere in the world! The Product ID on the back of the cart reads: NTR-005

Videos:

What do you think about this unseen game? Give your vote!

(6 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)

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I'm an Italian gamer with not enough free time to play as much as i'd like to and sadly not enough time to write about cancelled and beta games. Founder of Unseen64 in 2001, i'd like to sleep more than 5 hours a day, but i have to pay the bills. I'm currently working for various italian & international websites for a better User Experience & Search Engine Optimization, you can add me on Twitter, Last FM or contact me by email.

11 thoughts on “Nintendo DS Debug Cartridge”

salve xd. I’ve found some interesting strings in the rom. Probably these are the names of each program executed, but I’m not a great fan of ‘Mario & Co.’, so I don’t know if there is some connection between this strings and some interesting beta stuff. I’ll continue to search in the rom. Meanwhile, you can have a look to this strings:

… also, “Nitro Explorer” (program used to view nds roms’ files) doesn’t find anything. Probably this rom is using different extensions from those used by regual nds roms. Because it’s a Nitro cartridge, I guess…

This looks like there are very early super Mario 64 x4 ports in there. Great find i paused it at the right time and i found some important history from the SM64X4 development. One Frame looks like he has sunshine textures, in another frame it looks like he has a very bad quality texture. and the trees look really round. The location hes in i have no idea? where that is?! looks like a location from sunshine or a test location, because behind him is like Mt. Fuji. (The SM64DS Dev team is in japan)

This looks like there are very early super Mario 64 x4 ports in there. Great find i paused it at the right time and i found some important history from the SM64X4 development. One Frame looks like he has sunshine textures, in another frame it looks like he has a very bad quality texture. and the trees look really round. The location hes in i have no idea? where that is?! looks like a location from sunshine or a test location, because behind him is like Mt. Fuji. (The SM64DS Dev team is in japan)

THANK YOU SOO MUCH! very helpful. If you could please see if there is a way to play this or walk around as him in that place. :)

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